I have a social website. How do I market it online effectively? | Hacker News Reader

I have a social website. How do I market it online effectively?

19 pointseric120927 comments

My main experience is programming and I've finished a website that provides a fun way for people to read the news, vote and discuss the issues, and connect with other people with similar interests.

Could you share some of the effective ways to market it online to get more people to know about it? How to build buzz. How to get press coverage...

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I got decent traffic from http://www.KillerStartups.com for my quick and dirty free-stuff pligg project: http://freenormous.com

Pimping your stuff in forum posts and sigs like I'm doing above (hopefully tastefully) works. I would suggest you need to get over being shy about it and your first post should have had the URL. Also, track down anyone who blogs about your area (social news sites/poll sites) and contact them to let them announce you and or start commenting intelligently on their blogs.

Google will start bringing digg-like sites traffic based on your unique keyword combos after a while. I would post to some free directories to boost pagerank (but not paid links or directories) to help this happen sooner. There are also free forums for link announcements. These won't bring you much traffic directly, but google still is awarding some rank for the links and you will probably start placing for off-beat combos. I was getting google traffic for "huffing purel" for a while after a friend made a comment joking about that.

Google Analytics is a great tool. I suggest adwords to get some starter traffic. Be warned, my users were so lazy ( less than 1% post and almost none vote) that I started populating it using scrapers. They will lurk though and read your content. So if you get bored talking to yourself, try and build traffic fast. Avoid Adbrite if you do this--the traffic is worthless.

Anyhow, those are my tips...

Very helpful. Thank you.

Here is one thing you could do ( inspired by that youtube video marketer guy on techcrunch )

1. Nobody wants to join an empty social site. Either do it yourself or pay some people in 3rd world countries to have multiple accounts on your site and make it look popular. Each story should have hundreds of votes and there should be 10s if not hundreds of comments, its better if there is heated debate or discussion going on in the comments

2. Once it has the appearance of being popular, Time to make it popular.

-You could pretend to be a ron paul supporter and point out to other ron paul supporters that ron paul is getting the bad end of one your questions, and then 1000s of ron paul supporters would rush to your site to correct it.

-You could make a facebook app for it.

-You could do traditional advertising on other news or news related blogs.

I didn't see from this angle before. Thanks for the detailed comments.

Why are people still building Digg clones?

Don't knock him for that. What have you built?

if its not a digg clone, you can start marketing it by not describing it as having the same metrics of a digg clone.

how is it different?

http://www.gatherama.com/

if this is your site, then i would describe it as a way to poll people about a website with user submitted options to vote on.

digg is a 1 metric site, your site adds value by allowing people to define their own metrics.

I'd lose the digg color scheme though. It's very much reminiscent of digg.

Are we really believing that Digg is the unsurpassable pinnacle of social news?

Before Google came along, the search space looked pretty mature with plenty of entrenched players.

I would think its not that Digg is the pinnacle that these sites can be, but that social news sites are not usually defined by their features-even if a new social news site makes tons of improvements over the digg/reddit model, it simply won't have the user base that digg does. No one wants to use a social news site that no one else uses. Whereas with search, it doesn't really matter that no one else uses it because search isn't about other people.

If you could solve the problems of 1) users reposting the popular links from other social sites (without attribution), 2) spam bots, or 3) a ruling clique from taking over the front page, then you could compete with Digg and probably beat them.

Who is your target audience? If you don't know who they are, then your startup already has a problem... Once identified, can you think of any bloggers or other people that audience is inclined to listen to? If so, why not try contacting those individuals personally and ask them to take a look at your site and tell you what they think. Sending out a form email in this sort of outreach would be plain stupid and your response from them would be near nothing as you would deserve.

If you take the time to study these folks, you'll do much better. And if you're unable to convince them that your site's worth their while to use, then it probably isn't going to be a hit with your target group. Compared to any of the mass media approaches, this will cost less and work better.

This is a great suggestion. Thanks for sharing.

Just signed up on your site and I like the mixing together of news and polls.

we've just launched a free service http://www.freemyfriends.com that lets your users find their friends who are already members of your site without violating your user's privacy. We're looking for new startups to see if they are interested in using this service.

We're working on making the website look prettier, but we wanted to get it out to gauge market demand.

check out these articles, it should give you some ideas to get started. How can we build buzz: http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/24/smbusiness/build_buzz.fsb/

4 ways to market your business online: http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/04/magazines/fsb/online.marketi...

I've no advice, but be careful who you market it to; your first x users have a huge effect on the culture of the site.

Thank you for all your comments here. I'm a programmer and new to the marketing domain. All your comments are very helpful and give me some ideas of the dos and donts.

You can try submitting to Mashable and Techcrunch for press coverage.

you can try mine too. No flash, no ads and no trendy faded backgrounds. Just data. All opensource under a creative common doc license, half a million urls for download also.

http://botspiritcompany.com/botlist/

And while your at it, try mine too: no flash, no ads, and not a single image: http://newsconomy.com/

whats the url? that sounds like a great place.

http://www.gatherama.com

wow good work

Thanks for your encouraging words.

You need more Ron Paul on your site...

I've said this before, but it gets routinely ignored, so I'll put it in caps:

DROP THE GOOGLE ADS UNTIL YOU GET REAL TRAFFIC.

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